‘Like the watchful eye of the law’ ... tack room and saddles at the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. Photograph: Gary Calton

Miriam Gamble’s new collection, Pirate Music, extends her interrogation of human-animal relations, and includes an affectionate focus on horses. But no one approaching this week’s poem, Bodies, should be lulled into thinking “Oh, another horse poem – been there, read that …”. Gamble’s anthropomorphism is distinctly not of the obvious or sentimental kind.

Bodies contains a parable woven around the two particular things the junior horse “must learn” – namely, “to carry its own weight/ through the use of its quarters” and “to take a contact on the mouth”. The colt learns instinctively to balance upright on four legs, although the word “use” might hint at more intrusive burdens later on. But the “contact on the mouth” implies a sharper curb, the horse made subject to a human control that’s immediately seen as problematic.

In a vivid and uncomfortable comparison, this invasive “contact” is “light but present like the watchful eye of the law/ when one is a fundamentally law-abiding citizen”. Drily amused the tone may be, but the analogy leaves us in no doubt of the relentlessness of the curb.

Born in 1980, Gamble grew up in Belfast. Her work subtly unravels the fallacy of references to a “post-Troubles” generation. Conflict impinges on childhood in various ways, and one of the forms it may take is in strictures about speech. The repressive “contact on the mouth” in Bodies seems to connect with that famous injunction, “whatever you say, say nothing” – a requirement which, beyond merely recommending silence, may involve a duplicity or trivialisation that poets, in particular, can ill-afford.

Gamble pursues her comparison farther, building a list governed by the phrase, “It’s like […] the realisation that …”. In a characteristically unpredictable swerve, her speaker compares recognition of the curbing-effect to the disappointment of finding a favourite song has poor lyrics. The reference to “mind-hand” suggests performance – singing and playing, even karaoke. Contained in this new analogy is an aesthetic judgement which is essentially the speaker’s ruthless criticism of her own taste.

Social acceptability is the theme of the next two-and-a-half lines, in which enraged swearing and ironic self-justification (“‘I’m not an animal’”) reap the socially pious judgement, “‘she’s a bloody disgrace’”. The indiscriminate cursing sounds like a hopeless, near-comic protest, made more hopeless and near-comic by the hardly elegantly-phrased verdict. Yet there’s a whiff of defiant pleasure in such a transaction.

That “you cannot merely sing along to the good bits” and that you “must learn to carry your weight” are, of course, useful lessons for adult life. But the poem is not satisfied with such compromise. As if to reinforce the “light but present” permanence of the legal scrutiny, line four comes back to form line 15. The reiteration of “like the watchful eye of the law” in the final two lines suggests a Blues song, and the exclamation, “oh brother”, half-mocking but also angry, intensifies the sense of injustice, and suggests the motivation for the scrutiny could be racial. The poem’s title is also a reminder that “bodies”, dead ones, sometimes result from the law’s restraints. But there’s also a suggestion that external control may be so assimilated it becomes the creature’s own. In the “mind-hand” transference, it’s the body that absorbs the rebuke and takes the strain.

Gamble’s questions about freedom versus conformity often focus on the theme of nature undervalued and ill-at-ease in human society. In her previous Bloodaxe collection, The Squirrels are Dead, it was the despised and outlawed grey squirrel which interested the speaker, not “the perfectionist red …” (Twilight in Brompton Cemetery). Stubborn, ordinary, and often unloved, her birds and animals are more likely to expose the politics of the human tribe than the miracles of nature. And the poems are all the more original and unsettling because of it.

BodiesA horse must learn to carry its own weightthrough the use of its quarters,to take a contact on the mouththat’s light but present, like the watchful eye of the lawwhen one is a fundamentally law-abiding citizen.Or like the mind-hand’s realisationthat a song does not work by sound alone –that you must listen to the words and write it offif you do not like them. That you cannot have‘fuck this’, ‘fuck that’ and ‘I’m not an animal’without ‘she’s a bloody disgrace’;that you cannot merely sing along to the good bitsbut must learn to carry your weightthrough your quarters, take a contact on the mouththat’s light but present, like the watchful eye of the law,oh brother, like the watchful eye of the law.